If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Websleuths News

Join Websleuths Radio for the final discussion of THE KILLING SEASON
with Josh Zemam, Rachel Mills and special guests including Bob Kolker author of Lost Girls

Annals of Oological Crime: Egg Poaching on the Isle of Rum

Most of the bird eggs collected by Britain’s preëminent natural historians are housed at the Natural History Museum at Tring, forty-five minutes north of London. The Tring museum has the largest zoological collection ever amassed by a single person and is situated on the former estate of its founder, Lord Walter Rothschild, the banker and zoologist, who was famous for driving a zebra-drawn carriage. Rothschild died in 1937; more than two hundred animal species, including a worm, bear his name.
---
Oology—the study of eggs—is “one of the most exciting areas of ornithology and, in many respects, one of the least known,” Douglas Russell, the curator of the egg collection at Tring, told me. But Russell, a small, serious man with an orange goatee, was not eager to show me the collection. It has been, he said, “completely locked down” since 1979, after Mervyn Shorthouse, a regular visitor posing as a wheelchair-bound invalid, stole ten thousand eggs in a three-year period. I’d been directed to a side entrance next to a dumpster, where a guard took my bag and identification and escorted me to Russell, who held my passport to my face and gave me a hard stare. “That will be kept on file for five years,” he said, and led me down an echoing corridor to a photocopier, where he scanned my documents.

Shameless plug: those who soldiered through and enjoyed Rubinstein's NYer article in the OP should check out a past master of the genre: Joseph Mitchell, especially his "Up in the Old Hotel," a brilliant collection of his NYer pieces from days gone by. Rubinstein's fits the mold directly: off-the-beaten-path storyline peopled by one or more eccentric characters. Mitchell, a master prose stylist who was from North Carolina, brought a great eye and ear to tales of NYC. Rubinstein's piece here differs only slightly from Mitchell's, being set in Britain.